The recent development for multimedia applications on mobile terminals raised the need for flexible and scalable computing platforms that are capable of providing considerable (application specific) computational performance within a low cost and a low energy budget.

In MPSoC, the run-time manager takes the design time exploration information as an input and selects an active Pareto point based on quality requirement and available platform resources, where a Pareto point corresponds to a particular parallelization possibility of target application. To use system’s scalability at best and enhance application’s flexibility a step further, the resource management and Pareto point selection decisions need to be adjustable at run-time.

This thesis work experiments run-time Pareto point switching for MPEG-4 encoder. The work involves design time exploration and then embedding of two parallelization possibilities of MPEG-4 encoder into one single component and enabling run-time switching between parallelizations, to give run-time control over adjusting performance-cost criteria and allocation de-allocation of hardware resources at run-time.

The newer system has the capability to encode each video frame with different parallelization. The obtained results offer a number of operating points on Pareto curve in between the previous ones at sequence encoding level. The run-time manager can improve application performance up to 50% or can save memory bandwidth up to 15%, according to quality request.
Source: KTH
Authors: Abbas, Naeem

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